Paraphilia of the Day: Exhibitionism

In his book Rules for Patriots: How Conservatives Can Win Again, Steve Deace’s commandment #3 is “Never accept the premise of your opponent’s argument.” His commandment #7 is “Reverse the premise of your opponent’s argument and use it against him.” Under #7 Deace writes:

I get asked questions all the time from the Left’s perspective, and I never accept their premise. For example, in 2011 I did an interview on Dutch National Television. One of the questions was whether those who practice homosexuality should be allowed to serve openly in the military. “I believe all men and women that are physically qualified and able to conform to the Uniformed Code of Military Justice ought to be able to serve their country,” I replied. “But what about gays and lesbians,” the Dutch host asked. “I’m sorry, maybe you didn’t hear me,” I replied. “I believe all men and women that are physically qualified and able to conform to the Uniformed Code of Military Justice ought to be able to serve their country.” Now he looked confused. “So, is that a yes or a no?” “There are only two types of people,” I told him. “Men and women.” He had nowhere to go after that because I totally shut his premise down by rejecting it from the outset. From there I was on offense throughout the rest of the interview.

Too many people grant the premise. Deace adds:

[I] never accepted the premise of his question, and instead turned it around on him. “All of my friends and everyone in my family are either male or female,” I said. He looked puzzled and repeated his question. “Everybody I know is male or female,” I repeated. “I’m not aware of a third variation of the human species, but if you’ve discovered one I’d get the patent on that research quick-like, because I’m guessing there’s some money to be made there.”

Bernard Toutounji has a post up at Mercatornet.com titled, “There are no ‘gay’ people.” He explains that “Words convey reality” and “Inversely, the poor use of language can misinform a person or a whole society, about a particular truth.”

“Enter the word ‘gay’,” Toutounji writes:

At the most fundamental level a human person is just that, a person, and our personhood is lived out as a male or a female. These realities of personhood are not accidents or awards bestowed upon us. They are more identifying than stating we are a plumber, an athlete or a teacher. They describe us in a most intimate way because they describe our bodies which are the sign of who we are. We are born as human persons, nothing more and nothing less.

…

To refer to a person, any person, as ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’, (or even as ‘straight’) does a great injustice to who they are. When we do it we allow ourselves to fall into the push of a movement which seeks to minimise our basic human identity. We can say that a person has a ‘same-sex attraction’ because that is fundamentally different to saying that a person is ‘gay’. The sexual issues that a person may deal with are not issues that we should allow to dominate who they are; true companionship must be deeper than that. Even if a person declares apparent pride in their ‘sexual identity’ as ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘transgender’ etc., we need to uphold their innate dignity in the way we use our language.

Part of the purpose of this series is to help turn the conversation to what it is we’re really talking about. A person is a man or a women. They have a particular skin color and have an ethnicity. That’s it. To decide that it’s good to self-identify by your sexual predilections means that because there are so paraphilias we’re destined for an even bigger societal mess than we already have. If you think a lot of people are confused today, just wait.

Exhibitionism is the act of exposing in a public or semi-public context those parts of one’s body that are not normally exposed – for example, the breasts, genitals or buttocks. The practice may arise from a desire or compulsion to expose themselves in such a manner to groups of friends or acquaintances, or to strangers for their amusement or sexual satisfaction or to shock the bystander.[1]

I’m going to guess (and hope) that you didn’t know there were subcategories here as well:

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“If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions.” —James Madison (1792)